Stop conning the ignorant rubes in the name of magic invisible sky daddy.

There is nothing more disgusting than some lazy-assed criminal conning money out of a bunch of ignorant bozos by peddling homophobia. Especially when you look like the place one would mostly likely find you on your knees at is some piss stinking restroom next to an interstate.

During a conference call with Champion the Vote, the ostensibly non-partisan group that is working to increase the turnout among voters with a “biblical worldview,” Chuck Colson argued that Christians in America are a “sleeping giant” that has been beset by the domineering gay community. Colson cited the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a pioneer of public opinion polling who has been criticized for her work in Nazi Germany, who wrote about the “spiral of silence” in which minority opinions are marginalized quickly because people are afraid of alienation and punishment from the majority. Colson says that the gay rights advocates are now “controlling the conversation” even though they are a “tiny minority,” and said that it is time for Christians to “break the spiral of silence, to speak out, to point out unrighteousness.” “It hasn’t taken very many gays in our society to change this society’s attitudes towards something which we would have said is sexually deviant and is, but it doesn’t take much,” Colson said. “We’re the sleeping giant”:

We’ve fallen into the spiral of silence in which case the people who might be a tiny minority but are controlling the conversation intimidate the rest of us…. Now where have we seen that happen most vividly? We’ve seen it in the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement is a tiny minority in America, so what you get is a passionate movement of 10 percent of the people, 5 percent of the people maybe in the gay movement, maybe 4 percent, 3 percent, and they control what the rest of us think because the rest of us are intimidated into silence. Folks, brothers and sisters, I tell you I believe in the depths of my being that the most important thing we can do today in obedience to Christ is to break the spiral of silence, to speak out, to point out unrighteousness.

…

If people really intensely believe and have a passion for something and if they are given some sense of direction and purpose, it doesn’t take a lot of people. I’m sorry to use this example but it hasn’t taken very many gays in our society to change this society’s attitudes towards something which we would have said is sexually deviant and is, but it doesn’t take much. We’re the sleeping giant. We have forty percent of the country saying they are born again, my goodness how is it that Christian values are in retreat everywhere? It’s because we’re not organizing ourselves properly into a movement. So I want nothing more, nothing that I want more fervently right now that I’m giving my life to morning, noon and night than building a movement across this country that will restore what we believe will be the sanity and reasonableness of the Christian worldview.

Beneath the ever-expanding Occupy umbrella, one of the broad messages is this: people are fed up going through the regular political channels.

Politicians have – intentionally or otherwise – immersed themselves into the corporate toilet for the wholly unacceptable reason of retaining their political position and their life of privilege.

Metaphorically, our two-party political system is a giant decomposing carcass, where elected officials are imprisoned within its ribcage, expecting further sustenance from us. But they’ve had their feast. If the Occupy Movement becomes it’s own living and breathing entity, the inevitable will be accelerated: these politicians will devour each other. Let them.

There is, however, another industry verging on this sort of cannibalism, the corporate media. A body politic now eschews The Fourth Estate, dismissing part (if not all) of what it’s become.

This is materializing in more of an opaque and organic way than the 99’s denunciation of our political system and, to some degree, the Fourth Estate is now Occupied, being reconstructed and utilized to reestablish the public’s trust. The mainstream media may not quite be a decomposing carcass, as there are still quality sectors and true professionals, but the distrust has placed the profession on life-support

Citizens are not simply searching for alternative news sources, they’re creating their own media prism for an issue, story or an event to pass through.

The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Wyatt was a girl to the core, and now lives as one, with the help of a brave, loving family and a path-breaking doctor’s care.

Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality.

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

Once, when Wyatt appeared in a sequin shirt and his mother’s heels, his father said: “You don’t want to wear that.’’

“Yes, I do,’’ Wyatt replied.

“Dad, you might as well face it,’’ Wayne recalls Jonas saying. “You have a son and a daughter.’’

That early declaration marked, as much as any one moment could, the beginning of a journey that few have taken, one the Maineses themselves couldn’t have imagined until it was theirs. The process of remaking a family of identical twin boys into a family with one boy and one girl has been heartbreaking and harrowing and, in the end, inspiring — a lesson in the courage of a child, a child who led them, and in the transformational power of love.

Unmanned aircraft from an Air Force base in North Dakota help local police with surveillance, raising questions that trouble privacy advocates.

By Brian Bennett, Washington BureauDecember 10, 2011

Reporting from Washington—

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

“We don’t use [drones] on every call out,” said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. “If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don’t call them.”

At the close of an economic summit that appears to have failed to rescue Italy, Spain and more of Europe from sinking deeper into a mire of recession, Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott prefigures the collapse of the euro as a unifying currency of the European Union.

Across the board, pro-austerity responses to a complex of economic crises won the day, with nothing offered in the way of long-term structural reform. London will be spared the worst for a while, Elliott writes, “but the rest of the country will be laid waste.” When that happens, “the summit will be seen in its true light: another lurch up a blind alley for Europe and a Pyrrhic victory for Britain.”

Grimmer words rarely appear in the respected press. —ARK

Larry Elliott at The Guardian:

Europe is sleepwalking into a prolonged depression. The prospect of 2012 seeing the start of the break-up of the eurozone is a real one. Financial markets are already starting to pick apart what looks like the latest, if more sophisticated, attempt to kick the can down the road. Britain has isolated itself on the fringes of the European Union, perhaps the most significant development at a summit that assuredly did not draw a line under the crisis in the single currency. But at least the interests of the City of London were defended. For now.